Huawei's full HD MediaPad takes aim at big players

Day One at Mobile World Congress has shown ‘budget’ phone makers breaking out all their handsets ranging in price from budget to expensive, ish.

One of the flagship devices being presented by Huawei is its Android tablet, the Mediapad 10 FHD. FHD, of course, stands for Full HD, and in this case, 1920×1200 on a 10-inch multitouch LED LCD IPS panel. The design of the device resembles Apple’s unibody chassis, which in fact it is. Aluminum all around for this one.

On the inside, and contrary to the trend, Huawei has opted out of any third party entanglements with regards to the SoC. The Mediapad 10 FHD uses Huawei’s own home-grown K3V2 processor, a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM 9 SoC with a “16 core GPU”. Actually, the processor is built by HiSilicon, a Huawei subsidiary, but you get the idea. The HSPA+ module allows for transfer rates of up to 84Mbps which is also impressive. It runs on the same architecture as the Huawei Ascend D Quad.

The device sports an 8MP back-facing camera and a 1.3MP front-facing one for video conferencing. That’s enough for 720p video streaming if needs be.

Our only qualm with the device is whether the PRs messed up the comminqué. If the info is to be trusted, the Mediapad comes with 2GB of RAM. We wouldn’t trust this entirely, as Huawei actually phrases it as “memory storage of 2G RAM”, we’re awaiting Huawei’s reply on this, because if so, and GPU-providing, the Mediapad would actually make up one of the better Windows 8 candidates. However, the device uses Android 4.0.

All in all, the tablet promises a lot, especially the claims from Huawei about the performance being twice that of a Tegra 2 GPU, but we presume it is talking raw shaders count.

The Huawei Mediapad 10 FHD seems to be like one of those devices that will warrant a closer look when it is launched in the second quarter of 2012, but provided the price is right, it could knock some of the bigger names off their high horses.